The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Cliffs.

Instead of worrying about the fiscal cliff, Republicans ought to worry about the conceptual cliff.

A quip from the late reporting genius Bob Novak is making the rounds these days: "God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes. If they don't do that, they have no useful function." Some people think this is true, or should be. But as Pat Buchanan has pointed out, the GOP's track record on taxes could be half-decently described as one major malfunction after the next. The arc of history has Pat all but throwing in the towel:

Republicans may talk of reducing the size of government, cutting taxes and balancing budgets. But the history of the last century suggests the party has been driven into what may be described as an inexorable long retreat.

When Coolidge left the White House to "Wonder Boy," as he called Hoover, federal spending was 3 percent of gross national product.

Today, it is around 23 percent. Add state, county and municipal government spending, and we are at 38 percent. Anyone think this figure is going down in our lifetimes?

Can anyone say the GOP, if it is the party of small government and low taxes, has over the past 80 years been a successful party? Or does the America of today look more like the country Socialist Norman Thomas had in mind in 1932?

Small wonder rising Republicans have worked so swiftly to "change the message," embracing the apparently-new but in fact age-old appeal to upward mobility and a "right to rise." Alas, this retreat to Whiggery won't do much to change the electoral equation. The issue is not why we are tinkering around the edges of our political economy (and under whatever banner, this is what today's GOP is dedicated to as a matter of policy), but that tinkering has become a bipartisan orthodoxy so well-established that team Republicans are forced to accept the basic principles that Democrats accept, despite pushing with all their might to maintain a few token departures on outcomes (more guns, lower taxes).

The situation in the GOP is historically bad and getting worse -- because identity crises are now plaguing multiple factions on the right. The radical reformers are torn between moral and market fundamentalism. The elites have lost their foreign policy edge and, with it, any idea of how to claim it back. The establishment can't figure out where the Chamber of Commerce ends and crony capitalism begins. Embarrassingly, what we have here is a political party that doesn't understand how to ground itself in actually political claims. Put it all together, and you get centrists and wingers unhappy with their Speaker; you get a star Senator slamming the party's elder statesman; you get the incredible disappearing Ryan.

It's indicative of a problem that goes back to the birth of the Republican Party, which united Whig economy with Abolitionist morality. Politics was just a means to those ends; it took the Civil War to supply the GOP with a properly political proposition -- Union, above all, always and forever. That was potent stuff in 1860, and for decades after as we conquered our own American interior. But today the legacy of Unionism is a curse: the GOP veers like a drunk from hypernationalism to knee-jerk sectionalism. Sometimes, like a particularly bad drunk, it tries to do both at once.

The challenge is simple enough. Even if the GOP let itself be politically bankrupt, it could get a lot of mileage out of its economic and cultural agenda... if a large enough percentage of voters backed it up at the ballot box. Unfortunately, traditional morality is mostly sliding away, and even though some typically Republican issues, like abortion, are defying gravity, they're not winning elections. Worse, there just isn't a constituency for sweeping spending cuts. When Dick Cheney said deficits don't matter, he wasn't playing Econ professor.

Ironically, Democrats are worse off because they still really think the losing game they're playing is a winner. Republicans are beginning to know better. But without an animating political claim -- not an economic or cultural one -- the GOP will sail off the conceptual cliff no matter how self-aware. When cultural and economic conditions conspire to reward a national political organization, as they did for Republicans for many decades, it's sometimes unnecessary to dredge up or call down a fundamental political foundation upon which to build a party platform. These days, the culture and the economy are extremely unfavorable to Republicans. Left to today's trajectory, the GOP will put itself out of its misery, even if whatever replaces it continues for some strange reason to keep the tarnished brand name.

The good news? There actually are cultural and economic conditions that would richly reward a right-tilted political party with a suitably re-authenticated grounding in political principle. I'll be starting 2013 off with a sustained look at what those conditions are, what that principle might be, and how that re-authentication might work.